In attempting to comprehend a sentence, young children often fail to relate information in the sentence to contextual information presented previously. Thus these children tend to be insensitive to contradictory sentences, and to non-literal uses of sentences, such as sarcasm, irony, etc. In addition, the children may fail to resolve these comprehension problems and ensure the ultimate logical coherence of the communicative episode. One reason for this kind of comprehension failure is that children may not efficiently monitor or check their comprehension in an ongoing manner, and hence do not realize that information is inconsistent. This research attempts to determine why young children evaluate their comprehension inefficiently and the degree to which these children can repair instances of comprehension failure by integrating additional clarifying information, contradicting a speaker, or inferring the speaker's intent. These aspects of comprehension will be tested by probing children's comprehension of story and discourse information. Several elementary schools and 188 students from each of the first and third grades and college populations will be involved. This research should provide information about why children fail to comprehend interrelationships among sources of information, and some insight into how this comprehension can be facilitated. Thus it should have an important bearing on both comprehension of classroom materials and communicative effectiveness in daily intercourse.